


A Fraying Rope Can't Hold Your Weight

by orphan_account



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers - Ambiguous Fandom
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Mental Instability, Mental Institutions, Night Terrors
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-04-07
Updated: 2015-04-07
Packaged: 2018-03-21 17:02:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 625
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3700148
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I don't want to give away any spoilers.<br/>This is a story about what happens to Clint Barton between The Avengers and Age Of Ultron. It probably won't work after the movie comes out, but that's fine with me.</p>
<p>Writing this story is therapy for me. It has to be done, or it'll sit at my fingertips and itch until it gets out some other way. And I don't want it to. I want it to come out as words.</p>
<p>Trigger warnings will be added as needed. For now, if night terrors/mental illness are triggers for you, it's probably best if you don't read it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Fraying Rope Can't Hold Your Weight

It had taken all of his strength to keep himself together for that long. And he had known-- as every circus kid knows-- if you put too much weight onto a rope, it will snap. You can build the rope to be strong: you can weave it out of nylon, or metal. But even those have a breaking point.

His SHIELD training had taken his rope and rebuilt it from the ground up, but it still had the old parts, the fraying threads of the orphan boy he once was. And for a few months, the SHIELD threads held it together.

He thanked God that he wasn’t on a mission when they started to fail. He had time off-- more than he needed, more than he wanted. Living in Stark Tower meant he got his own floor. More space than he could ever have imagined using only a few years ago. Even now, a quarter was unused. Blank, dusty space. He lay down in it and stared at the ceiling.

“Are you alright, Mr. Barton?” JARVIS asked, his voice coming in from some unknown location in the walls or the ceiling. God. He’d never get used to that.

“‘m fine.” was the reply. The butler didn’t push it further. 

As the individual threads began to wear down, he spent more time in the vents (why the hell had Tony made them large enough to crawl around in? It was a security risk!) and on the roof (because nobody else liked it up there). Nobody noticed. Nobody really cared. He’d always been the outsider to everyone but Tasha, and she was somewhere in Russia kicking mafia ass. He wished she was here to kick his ass instead. A little more cognitive recalibration. Maybe that would fix him.

He dreamed of falling, and missing his bus. He hadn't taken buses in a long-ass time.

He dreamed of walking a tightrope that snapped in two as he was crossing the busiest highway he’d ever seen in his life. 

He dreamed of a puppy. A puppy getting hit by a car.

He stopped sleeping. Why bother when you wake up flipping your shit at some ridiculous hour of the morning?

He fell asleep.

He dreamed of blue eyes; of a god that was not his own. He vowed that he would pry his eyes open, drink coffee, Red Bull, steal stimulants from Banner’s lab-- whatever he could do to avoid the images that plagued him from the moment his head hit the pillow to oh-two-hundred military time. And when he did wake up, Jarvis would ask him the same question as he always did, and his answer was always the same.

“I’m fine.”

Eventually the stash of food that he kept on a shelf in the more-unused part of the apartment grew thin. Ramen, jerky, more ramen. Not much for anyone live on, and especially not him. He was going to have to go down to the kitchen at some point in time, which would mean potentially running into Banner, or Stark. Or Steve. None of whom he could face right now.

When the last pot of noodles was gone, he just stopped eating. The hunger kept him awake, anyway. He wasn't sure when the last time he'd slept was. The kitchen was beckoning to him, but it wasn't safe at any hour: with Banner and Tony, especially Tony doing mad science for ridiculously long stretches of time it was impossible to know when it would be free.

So he did the most logical thing he could think of: jump out a window.

He realized exactly what it looked like he was trying to do halfway down. He wasn't.

He was just trying to get to the convenience store.


End file.
